I disliked it. Yet another dead horse time travel reset button pushing episode with no real purpose other than a filler episode in the Xindi plot.

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Agreed. That episode sucked shit.

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I couldn't begin to match your eloquence.

But never let it be said I didn't try. The first bit is there's really nothing original about this one. Children of Time anyone? This exact concept down to the accident sending the crew back in time and their descendants running into them. They even so the same routine, who hooked up with who in the future conversations. And again, the same conflict between the descendants and main crew about maintaining the descendants timeline with almost the same resolution too. The reset button was pushed as if it had never happened in the end. T'Pol's argument about them remembering isn't exactly convincing being there are multiple incidents of Time Travel resets that Trek characters remember... like the aforementioned Children of Time for example.

Plus this whole episode is just a blatant filler. The Xindi plot arc is really coming to a climax with Archer about to appear before the council and they throw this one at us? Just when you really start to get into an Enterprise story arc, it's like they deliberately try and come up with something to mess it up. Sure, I get the need that over a 26 episode season sometimes you do need random filler episodes that don't have much to do with the overall story arc, but to put it right in the middle of the climax of the season's arc?

There were some nice character bits in this one with Trip, Lorian and both T'Pols, but that's all that's really not enough to make the episode enjoyable to me. Last time I rewatched the Xindi arc I did just skip this one... you can do that and lose nothing in the storyline.

As I said, there were some nice character bits. I wouldn't really call it development though being nothing really came of it. I was thinking surely they'd use it to get T'Pol to back out on chickening out on Trip the morning after... but nothing really came of it. It wasn't even mentioned during the Terra Prime arc to say nothing of their surprise then that a Vulcan/human baby could work.

Well I loved E2. It was the ultimate fangirl wankery but it was just delicious. Lorian was a great character who actually looked like both his parents. Old T'Pol reminds me of Old Spock in ST:XI.. you can see how at peace and mellowed Vulcans become in advanced age, less striving and more accepting. I love time travel and the what if scenario was so well done.. lots and lots and lots of Denobulan children and poor Reed without offspring. Archer walking with his great-something grand daughter. Old T'Pols affection for Trip after decades without him .. and young T'Pol's stubborn refusal to take advice from what if scenarios.

"E2" does halt the flow, but at least it does so in a way that fits into the story. Other standalone episodes, such as "North Star" (which I enjoyed), just don't fit into the season at all and probably should have been saved for later.

I liked "E2" much more than DS9's "Children of Time", I guess because I prefer the ENT characters. And that they lived on a broken down spaceship the whole time, had a mission the whole time (which they failed at. Oops.)

But I do think Old T'Pol was made too old, considering Vulcan lifespans.

And of course, maybe they were destroyed, maybe they never existed.... or maybe they could still be out there somewhere.

I like it also. And it does at least get the ship to their big meeting on time, so it's not totally disposable, like "Rajiin". Plus, it's got John Connor's father-in-law! C'mon, that's pretty cool.

To me, the biggest flaw with the episode is actually a flaw of the show, that it often introduced potentially cool elements, but rarely did anything much with them. Why couldn't the E2 have stuck around for two or three eps? Why not leave our ship with a few of their crew? Did the other ship ever go back to the Wild West planet? Is there a small colony of non-combatant crew descendants somewhere? Etc.